PINKY

    I met Pinky on-line at a low point in my life. I enjoyed our conversations and her sprightly sense of humor. She was somewhat more conservative than I but I sensed that maybe this was not a serious issue, she was living in Prineville after all, an area that a former governor once called, "the other Oregon". In more recent times that county has wished to join 6 others to become a part of what can ironically be called, Greater Idaho. I drove to Prineville twice to visit her, it wasn't too bad. There were fine local beers, a local distillerie, and hemp fields, but the NRA yard signs left an oppressive taste. There was a third trip that had to be put off due to a forest fire closing the highway. Pinky had been living with her youngest son and his wife and was pretty much housebound due to her mobility issues. There was a senior center eight blocks away but it might have been eight miles. Later she got an apartment with another woman but her housemate treated her abusively. 

    The next step was closer to Portland. Pinky moved into her nephews house in Tigard and we spent a lot of time at the Tigard Senior Citizens Center. I was living on my little boat, a 27'  Bayliner Contessa. I was cautious about inviting her to spend the night due to the steep ramp into the Marina, but she negotiated it well enough and I ended up asking her to join me. It was the summer of 2019. We were the odd couple there, older and more connected to the dock than our few neighbors and the transient boaters around us. 

     Living in a marina has rigors not normally encountered in life. The weather, especially in the winter, was harsh, you needed to walk to the bathroom, shower, and laundry, rain or shine, or frozen. Sometimes you needed to share the floating walkway with an aggressive goose, or a flock of ducks. For a while Pinky was able to do this with regular rest-stops. Sharing the interior of my little boat was difficult as well. There was one comfortable settee' and the forward birth. The starboard settee' was uncomfortable after a short while. On warm days I had beach chairs on the finger pier. Mostly we spent the daylight hours at the Senior center or at various events in the area. Most notably, The Cathedral Bridge Jazz Festival, and various events in Sellwood Park. One cold November day my shorepower collar came loose and melted the reciever, what I like to call the 'guzzinta'. We drove around looking for a replacement power cord or head and collar if 50' of cord was not available. It was cold that day so I took Pinky to her nephew to spend the night. By the next day I had secured a new 50' shorepower cord. But I had fried the grounded electric receptacles on the starboard side. The port side, since it ran off of the batteries, was fine. As long as they held a charge. We were able to move Pinky aboard again the next day while I replaced the fried electrical sockets on the starboard side.

     I knew that I had taken on a responsibility that I was not prepared for, but I liked being with Pinky. In times when we were boat-bound by the weather, I read her passages from my book, or some from my blog, sometimes I read her my response to an unsuspecting troll on Facebook whose butt I chose to sand. She loved those. We were trying to get her in an assisted living center because she was going to have hip replacement surgery in Feb. of 2020. That was delayed because of a rising Covid 19 wave, which became a lockdown by March. There was no surgery, nowhere to go for entertainment, and our hunt for assisted living had ground to a halt. Pinky had also weakened so that she needed a walker to move around. When she went to the bathroom or shower, I would push her sitting on the chair. We would stop for her to stand when we reached a bump between two sections. The denizens of the marina would come out to greet us yelling encouragement. We were quite a sight. Our daily activities changed to meet the quarentine conditions. We would go for a drive or sit in a local park looking at the river and not much else. She was barely able to make it to the top of the ramp out of the marina. As the spring wore on there were some small strokes. Once we were laying in the forepeak berth early in the morning and suddenly her speech became childlike. Aside from her speech there were no other physical manifestations. Living in the marina presents problems for an ambulance crew. They have to roll the stretcher down the ramp empty, and up the ramp with a human strapped on. We thought about it, but she was otherwise able to move about, so we got dressed and I pushed her up the ramp in her walker. At the top she would sit under cover while I brought the car out of the parking garage and down to the landing. At the hospital they gave her a shot to mitigate the damage from a serious stroke and did a brainscan to assess damage. It turned out to be a small stroke with no damage. The speech defect had disappeared by the time we made it to the hospital emergency room. Another time we were driving to a little brewpub with outside seating. I asked her to hand me something but she couldn't close her hand around it. She had, by this time moved into an assisted living facility on Stark Street in Portland run by a company called Avamere. It seemed to be a  Catholic institution. It was their wish for me to bring her to the facility where the ambulance would meet us so she would not be made to wait in the Emergency Room for attention. They took good care of Pinky and the facility was not as depressing as the nursing homes of years ago. Pinky developed some friends there at the facility. Maybe because they were all watching the door of life closing on them. Like a grade school designed by Ted Cruz, there was only one way out. There were also some staff members that would drop in to talk and joke with Pinky. If they were changing her clothing I was obliged to step out into the hallway and wait for permission to enter. At first i explained that we had shared a boat, and that forward berth, but to no avail. At times I would try to help Pinky with her shower or with her toilet functions, but was warned by the staff that I should let them support her on the way to the bathroom or to help her with the shower. As her health declined we got her an electric scooter to move around. We could still go for our daily drive but she used the scooter to get to my car or back from the car. I would drive the scooter back to the reception area or out to the car at the end of our drive. 

The next event was her declining blood-oxygen saturation which dropped precipitously after any form of exertion. For a while we carried an oxygen bottle with us on our drives which limited our outings to about 3 hours, the capacity of an oxygen bottle. Later she needed to be on her oxygen concentrater when she wasn't on the bottle and cannula. Our activities now were limited to the Bingo and other in-house recreation, where she socialized with her friends. Of course sometimes the facility had a positive Covid test, and would be shutdown for two weeks.

     Too soon that was no longer possible. Pinky was still lucid and we would amuse ourselves in her small apartment. All during this time, when Pinky was feeling low I would tell her that I was going to be there for her until the end. I knew that this was becoming a cruel reality, not merely a metaphore. Some of the staff would take me aside from time to time and tell me she was transitioning to the next stage of her journey. It was a journey, not a death. I suppose that made it a little more palatable for me, but it was not really comforting. 

When we moved her into the assisted living center, her oldest son and his wife came out to help and to move the double bed with memory foam matress and electric adjustment. From time to time Murray would make the trip out from Redmond to spend some time with her. At such time i would leave them alone in the small apartment. They were polite to me but not what you would call warm. There were many reasons but my provocative t-shirts were part of the reason. By September of 2021, Pinky's doctor suggested hospice care. I wavered at first, but was helped by the staff to understand the need. This was a continuing part of my evolution. When we first were together on the boat, I tried to urge Pinky to try to get more exercise so that she could withstand the rigors of marina life. She fought me. Slowly, it began to dawn on me that this was Pinky's life, not mine, and I could not know the extent of the pain she lived with. Nor was she willing to submit to the program I had outlined for her at this late part of her life. By the time she was put on hospice care the lesson had pretty much sunk in. Hospice did have one benefit: If the facility had a quarantine due to Covid detection, I was still allowed to visit Pinky. They told us that they would re-evaluate Pinky in six months. This was, I suppose another way of saying that her time was drawing near. Their assessment was pretty accurate, she died on Mar. 24, 2022. On about March 21, Pinky went through another transition. She needed to be assisted with her feedings. I would be there for her breakfast and lunch, the aides would feed her at dinner. I called Murray to tell him I didn't think she would last much longer. At first he thought it was maybe not so critical, but I explained to him what was going on with her. He arrived the next afternoon and would spend the night with her while I spent the daylight hours. By the 23rd, Pinky was no longer able to communicate. When I left her that afternoon to Murray's care I knew that she was close. At 3:00 AM the nurse called me to tell me that Pinky had passed at 2:53AM. Murray and the hospice nurse were with her when she took her last breath. I am happy that she was with her son. I felt a little sad that I wasn't there, but she needed to be with family. 

     Our time together had been brief but enjoyable. I miss Pinky, we had some good times together. I learned many things from her, not the least being the need to be there for a dying friend and loved one. Another lesson was to keep my mouth shut when someone is living in a health crisis I know nothing about.